II. Resurrecting the Outlaw Hero

While The Dukes of Hazzard may not be a realistic
device with which to study Southern culture, the success of The
Dukes as a television commodity deserves attention. Critics
never hesitated to assault the show, but at the same time, people
across the nation never hesitated to tune it in every Friday night
at 8 p.m. Questions as to why the Dukes sold so well, and who
bought it, have interesting answers and implications. For
Southerners, the show served as a remedy for the bruising that
their egos took during the civil rights movement. The
Dukes appealed to outsiders because its release was so well
timed, offering them just the right image of the South at just the
right time. After two decades of disenfranchising the South from
the rest of their nation, Americans acceptance of The Dukes
helped to mark the end of an era of division.

The cover of The Dukes's story album

The Dukes' popularity shows in the standard Nielsen
ratings and also in other, less typical areas. It ranks as the
62nd most popular television series of all-time, and Waylon
Jennings' theme song, "Good Ole Boys," is one of only five to sell
a million singles. [23] The show finished in the Nielsen top 20 for
four consecutive seasons, finishing at No. 2 in 1981. [24] The Top 20
streak would probably have continued if Duke boy actors Tom Wopat
and John Schneider had not decided to sit out the 1983 fall season
because of a contract dispute. Wopat and Schneider filed a lawsuit
for $25 million against Warner Brothers, alleging that the company
shortchanged them on royalties from the $190 million worth of
Dukes toys, games, and clothes--sales "considered to be
among the most lucrative in TV history." [25] When Wopat and Schneider
left and CBS tried to cast replacement cousins Coy and Vance,
The Dukes plummeted from the top 20 and never made it back,
making the show a victim of its own success.

Ben Jones, as Cooter, peers at Roscoe

The Dukes were so popular, that even majority leaders
of the United States Congress have had to contend with it. Ben
Jones, who played the friendly mechanic Cooter on the show, ran
against Georgia incumbent Pat Swindall for the House of
Representatives and lost after Swindall attacked Jones' Duke-style
brushes with the law and troubles with alcohol. But Jones took on
Swindall again in 1988, and won the seat, serving in the house for
four years. He lost in the 1992 election, when he faced off against
Newt Gingrich after the two incumbents' seats were combined during
reapportionment. [26]

Even in 1996, with the return of The Dukes on The
Nashville Network, the series still remains popular. After nearly
ten years off of the air, the series came back in February, and
scored a 1.5 in the Nielsen s airing at 7 p.m. TNN is currently
drawing more 18-34 year old viewers at that time slot than MTV. [27]
The Evidence of The Dukes success lies evident in more
realms of American culture than perhaps any television show that
preceded or followed it.

McGee puts stock in television as a tool that "can be used to
pry out more information about society" because "television imagery
reveals information about American social issues-ethnic
stereotypes, sex roles, violence and others." [28] By answering the
question as to why The Dukes succeeded, and who they
succeeded with, interesting "information about American social
issues" presents. The caricature of the South created in Hazzard
County possessed something for everybody, a break from reality that
Americans from across the country enjoyed taking.

It is unsafe to assume that The Dukes' fan base came
from outside of the South, and that Northerners and Westerners
relaxed on Friday night to chuckle and say, "'We are smarter than
they are. Look at those dumb, silly, banjo-playing hicks." [29] Some
Southern critics of the show would like that to be the case,
labelling shows like The Dukes "the most intensive effort
ever exerted by a nation to belittle, demean, and otherwise destroy
a minority people within its boundaries," [30] If either of these
assertions were true, then Southerners would have chosen not to
tune in every Friday at night with the rest of America to watch
themselves take a beating. The ratings of May, 1980, provide a
perfect example that this is not the case. That month, the Dukes
scored an overall Nielsen of 19.9, but scored twice as high (26.7)
in the South as they did in the North (13.4). [31]

Orrin Klapp, in Heroes, Villains, and Fools, writes of
the deterioration of the hero, or the role that imperfect heroes
have as audience conciliators:

In some [heroes] in which on the surface, everything is
'all right,' there may be trouble beneath.... a hero can have
compensatory functions, to console people, as it were, for a
recognized lack of what the hero represents. [32]

The Dukes on the prowl

Bo and Luke, clearly the heroes in the show, were not college
educated or consistently employed for that matter. The Duke boys
lacked the polish, intelligence, and uncompromising moral character
of a standard hero. They were simply "good ole boys" who "wouldn't
change if they could," as Jennings' theme song preaches. Happy
with their circumstances and purportedly unable to alter them,
The Dukes implied to the average Southerner that they could
believe the same thing, making the Cash s hell of a fellow ideal
seem much easier to attain.

In the North and the West, what kept The Dukes from the
fate of its predecessors was perfect timing. The outlaw-hero had
long been a common icon in the South. George Ward, in the
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, traces the roots of
outlaw-heroes in the South

from the Regulators of South Carolina, the first
organized vigilantes in America, to Luke and Bo Duke of The
Dukes of Hazzard, honorable outlaws have been celebrated in
southern folklore, popular culture, and high arts. [33]

Cash talks of the "social schizophrenia" of the Southern
character, between hedonism and puritanism, violence and chivalry,
wanderlust and tradition. [34] Ward believes that "nowhere has this
split psyche been more apparent than in the southern outlaw-hero
and nowhere else have these contradictions been so reconciled." [35]
For the entire decade of the sixties, the only representatives of
this outlaw dichotomy had been national enemies like Bull Connors,
George Wallace, and the Klu Klux Klan. The outlaw hero took a
shellacking in the sixties, and events in the seventies helped give
the Duke boys a chance to bring put the hero back onto the end of
outlaw.

The Duke family pose with Cooter

Kirby chronicles the evolution of events in the seventies as
a sign that the media was changing their portrayal of the South
from "hostile to a very friendly Dixie." [36] Events of the previous
twelve years set the stage for The Duke's success. In 1976,
Jimmy Carter, a native Georgian country boy, ascended all the way
to the White House. Developments in several other different areas
of American culture helped to illustrate the "fast fading" of "the
Devilish South genre:" [37] First, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other
marchers were rocked and spat upon by Northerners on television.
"Suddenly, the devilish white South, for years evoked on TV by
plump mothers, verbally abusing frightened little black children at
schoolyards, dissolved in the vision of plump Yankees behaving the
same way," says Kirby. [38] In 1971, James Meredith returned to
Mississippi to practice law, deciding that life was better for
blacks there than in New York. A black, "Country Charlie" Pride,
appeared on the Grand Ole Opry. In 1974, just three years later,
President Nixon spoke to the Grand Ole Opry, praising country music
because it "talks about family. It talks about religion. And
it... makes America a better country." [39] In 1971, The
Waltons appeared on television, winning critical and viewer
acclaim while preaching that one could lead be "poor, yet blessed
with a good life." [40] Images of the folksy South served to flush much
of the residue of the sixties debacle out of the American mind, and
clear the stage for the media to reintroduce the "far more
popular... new direction, law-and-order South," of Walking
Tall and The Dukes of Hazzard

With the benefit of all of Kirby s insight, and plenty of
paradigms to follow, the producers of The Dukes of Hazzard
constructed a program perfectly designed to resell the South to the
American people. The Southern amalgamation that was The
Dukes managed to keep Southerners tuning in for their
conciliatory heroes, but also managed to resurrect the Southern
outlaw-hero for the rest of the country. Just as the wave of
resentment that Americans had built up over the past twenty years
finally broke, the perfectly timed Dukes rode the unleashed
momentum all the way to the top of the Nielsen ratings.